Chapter 3 Nola #3
Something shifts in Fen's expression. Not pity, nothing that simple.
Recognition, maybe. The look of someone who understands that some people's baseline for acceptable conditions is lower than others, not because they deserve less, but because they've had less and learned to work with it.
Fen came from somewhere bad too. I can see it in the way she holds herself, the self-sufficiency, the competence that comes from having no one to rely on but yourself.
"You'll fit in here," Fen says. Then, more quietly: "We really needed a doctor. Thresh won't say it. He doesn't say things like that. I think the closest he gets to expressing need is running the hiring protocol and then watching the new arrival on security cameras for a week."
"He said I could leave. No penalty."
"He says that to everyone. Nobody's left yet. Not the ones who matter."
I think about that as I walk back to my quarters.
The corridors are quieter now, dimmed for the night cycle.
The lighting drops to a blue-tinged minimum that makes the gray walls look almost peaceful.
My quarters are small: a bunk, a desk, a storage unit, a tiny bathroom with a shower that I'm betting has two temperature settings, cold and colder.
The mattress is better than I expected. The blanket is standard issue military surplus, which means it's ugly and warm, and those are the only two qualities a blanket needs.
I sit on the bunk and pull up my personal terminal.
I have messages. Three from collection agencies, which I delete without reading because reading them changes nothing and the anxiety they generate helps no one.
One from the temp agency that placed me here, confirming my first month's deposit will process in thirty days.
One from my mother, who lives on a different mining colony and worries the way mothers do when their daughters take jobs at the edge of space.
I type a reply to Mom. "Arrived safe. Station is fine.
Job is good. Will write more soon." I almost add "the asteroid field is beautiful" because it is and because she would like to know that I can see something beautiful from here.
But beautiful things in Fringe stations make mothers worry more, not less, because beauty at the edge of nowhere implies distance, and distance is the enemy of every parent whose child works in space.
Short, vague, and reassuring. The medic's equivalent of "I'm fine, don't worry," which is always a lie but always the right thing to say.
She doesn't need to know about the understocked supply closet or the expired medication or the security chief who looks at me like I might be carrying a weapon instead of a stethoscope.
She has enough to worry about. The mine's been running double shifts since the Helix expansion, and her back isn't what it was.
I lie back on the bunk and stare at the ceiling.
The station hums around me. Pipes, recyclers, the low vibration of a gravity generator that needs maintenance, a subtle unevenness in the gravitational pull that I can feel in my inner ear if I'm still enough.
I catalog the sounds automatically. Healthy station noises versus warning signs.
Nothing alarming tonight. The station sounds tired, the way its chief of security sounds tired, but it sounds functional.
Seventy-two patients. Fourteen with no medical records. A supply closet that's almost empty. A security chief who watches me like I'm a bomb that might go off.
And a six-month contract that I'm starting to think was never really about the money.
Not for the people who wrote it. They put "triple pay" in the posting because they needed someone desperate enough to come.
And they needed someone to come because people here are sick and hurt and scared and they need a doctor.
The money is the bait. The work is the hook.
And the hook is the kind that goes in deep and doesn't come out clean.
I'm a doctor. That's the one thing I've been sure of since I was twelve years old, watching my mother wrap her cracked hands in strips of cloth because the mine didn't provide medical supplies for workers.
I decided then that I would learn to fix people, and I did, and the fixing is the thing that makes sense when nothing else does.
The station's gravity fluctuates, just barely, a tiny lurch in my inner ear that lasts half a second.
The generators need calibration. I add it to a mental list that already includes supplies, vaccinations, allergy databases, humidity fixes, and the question of what exactly this station is really doing out here.
I have theories. The population composition, the security chief who won't tell me anything, the way people flinch at loud noises and sleep with their doors locked.
I'm not stupid. But theories can wait. Patients come first.
I close my eyes and fall asleep in under three minutes, which is a skill I developed in residency and have never lost. When you don't know when you'll get to sleep next, you learn to do it fast. The station hums its lullaby of recycled air and distant machinery, and I let it carry me down.
Tomorrow, I see the rest of the patients. Tomorrow, I start building something that works.
Tonight, I sleep.